SENATOR ROBERT F. KENNEDY was the leading Democratic candidate in the 1968 presidential contest. Kennedy called for ending the war in Vietnam and ran on a platform of racial and economic justice, non-aggression in foreign policy, decentralization of power and social improvement. Had he won the presidency, he would have re-opened the investigation into the murder of his brother, President John F. Kennedy. After winning the California primary, Kennedy made his final victory speech at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968.

As he exited through the hotel pantry, Senator Kennedy was shot from behind at close range. Thomas Noguchi, the Chief Medical Examiner for Los Angeles, conducted the autopsy and concluded that the fatal shot had not been fired by Sirhan Sirhan, but had come from a gun very close to the back of Kennedy’s head and penetrated his skull behind the right ear at an upward angle. The fatal shot came from a distance of no more than one to three inches away (3 – 7.5 cm). Sirhan Sirhan, however, the alleged assassin, had been standing several feet in front of Kennedy.

WHO SET THE STAGE? How could Sirhan Sirhan, or his handlers, possibly know that Senator Kennedy would be coming through the hotel kitchen? How did they have access to the hotel kitchen? Where was hotel security? Who was controlling the hotel?

THE AMBASSADOR HOTEL, where Bobby Kennedy was shot in June 1968, was owned by Myer Schine, who was connected to Mickey Cohen, the West Coast crime boss who hated Bobby Kennedy.

MYER SCHINE had close relations with organized crime and owned a network of hotels in Florida and across America that earned money by hosting illegal casinos and gambling operations.

MICKEY COHEN – The West Coast crime boss (born Meyer Cohen) ran an illegal casino from Myer Schine’s Ambassador Hotel in the late 1940s. He started out with Bugsy Siegel and was allied with Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello by the early 1940s. At age thirty-four, Cohen took over when Siegel was murdered in 1947. Cohen’s plan for total control included a newspaper, a wire-tapper, and the state’s attorney general. Illiterate, he hired a tutor to learn to read and write. He became involved with major Hollywood figures and top politicians. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, Dean Martin, Jerry Lewis, and Sammy Davis Jr. were just a few of the stars that bowed to the new boss, according to his biography. One of his specialties was blackmailing movie stars with secrets, often of a sexual nature. Most importantly, U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy prosecuted Cohen in 1961. Cohen was sentenced to 15 years in Alcatraz. Kennedy’s successful crackdown on organized crime made him Cohen’s “great enemy.”

MENACHEM BEGIN, the head of the terrorist Irgun in 1943-48, fled Palestine following his organization’s bombing of a Jerusalem hotel, which killed 15 people in January 1948. While hiding in Los Angeles, Begin met Mickey Cohen and other undesirables. Cohen and other Jewish gangsters, such as Meyer Lansky, provided Begin’s terrorist Irgun with weapons and money. Begin’s terrorist gang rebranded itself as the Likud in the 1970s and has ruled the state of Israel since.

MYER SCHINE’S GRANDSON – James Schine Crown is president of Henry Crown and Company, a family-owned company. Crown is lead director of the defense contractor General Dynamics and is a director of JPMorgan Chase. The Crown family was connected to the Warren Commission and profited greatly from the Vietnam War.

MRS. LESTER CROWN is Renee Schine, the daughter of Myer Schine.

AN INTERESTING COINCIDENCE was that Renee Schine (bottom row) returned from Europe on the Queen Mary in August 1948 with Jacqueline Bouvier (top row) in 1948. I called Mrs. Crown to ask if she remembered Jackie and got a very odd response. She pretended to be someone else, but when I said what I was calling about, she said it was not true. How odd, I thought. Why would any person venture to say such a thing if she were not, in fact, Renee Schine Crown? My questions to Lester Crown went unanswered. When they answer the phone at Henry Crown & Co. they don’t answer the phone by identifying themselves; they answer by giving the phone number: 312….. How odd.

Most amazingly, the Crown family is also connected to the 1968 assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.

Bobby Kennedy was killed in the Ambassador Hotel, which was owned by Myer Schine, the father of Renee Schine and father-in-law of Lester Crown. Schine also owned the Gulf Stream Hotel on Miami Beach where J. Edgar Hoover spent his winter holidays – free of charge.

The Crown family of Chicago, the controlling family of the huge defense contractor General Dynamics, is connected to all kinds of things, but for the same family of war profiteers to be connected to the assassinations of both John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, and the terror attacks of 9-11, is either a remarkable coincidence or an indication of involvement in these mega-crimes.

LBJ & THE TFX SCANDAL

Henry Crown became the largest shareholder of Texas-based General Dynamics when he merged his sand and gravel (and cement) company, Material Service Corp., with the nearly bankrupt defense contractor in 1959. Crown’s new company was in dire straits financially until 1962 when it was rescued by a $7 billion contract to produce a new fighter jet for the military. This became known as the TFX/F-111 scandal. In 1963, General Dynamics came under congressional investigation to determine exactly how Henry Crown had finagled this huge Texas deal.

Peter Dale Scott, the author of Deep Politics and the Death of JFK (1993), explains how Lyndon Johnson was tied into this crooked deal:

According to President Kennedy’s secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, Bobby Kennedy was also investigating Bobby Baker for tax evasion and fraud. This had reached the point where the President himself discussed the Baker investigation with his secretary, and allegedly told her that his running mate in 1964 would not be Lyndon Johnson. The date of this discussion was November 19, 1963, the day before the President left for Texas.

A Senate Rules Committee investigation into the Bobby Baker scandal was indeed moving rapidly to implicate Lyndon Johnson, and on a matter concerning a concurrent scandal and investigation. This was the award of a $7-billion contract for a fighter plane, the TFX, to a General Dynamics plant in Fort Worth. Navy Secretary Fred Korth, a former bank president and a Johnson man, had been forced to resign in October 1963, after reporters discovered that his bank, the Continental National Bank of Fort Worth, was the principal money source for the General Dynamics plant.

On November 22, 1963, the day of the assassination, a closed session of the Senate Rules Committee heard sworn testimony from a Baker business associate, Don Reynolds. Reynolds was telling the committee of a big lobbyists’ sex party in New York, and also of a suitcase he had seen, full of money which Baker described as a $100,000 payoff to Johnson for his role in securing the Fort Worth TFX contract. His testimony was broken off by the news that the President had been shot.

This bit of history indicates that Vice President Lyndon Johnson was involved in a criminal way in the crooked TFX deal that gave Henry Crown’s new company the largest military aircraft contract in U.S. history. As the recipient of a $100,000 payoff, Johnson would have been in a position in which he could be blackmailed by Henry Crown.

Henry Crown’s personal lawyer, Albert E. Jenner, who also served as a director of General Dynamics, was appointed by Lyndon Johnson to the Warren Commission where he was tasked with investigating the evidence of a conspiracy behind Lee Harvey Oswald and Jack Ruby. He found none.

J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, personally directed the FBI investigation into the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations issued a report in 1979 critical of the FBI investigation and the Warren Commission. The report criticized the FBI’s reluctance to thoroughly investigate the possibility of a conspiracy to assassinate the President.

The United States House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Committee’s final report concluded that Kennedy was probably assassinated as a result of a conspiracy.

J. Edgar Hoover, however, was in a compromised position, as Deep Politics reveals:

All of these anti-Communist politicians, but J. Edgar Hoover above all, exposed themselves to political blackmail by visiting the Del Charro in the company of mobsters. Hoover even had a special detail of FBI agents to ensure that mobsters would not come up to him in public at the racetrack. But his love of horse racing and gambling meant that his holidays recurringly exposed him to the milieu of organized crime, whether at the Del Charro or (his other annual freeloading holiday) the Gulf Stream Hotel owned by the family of the McCarthy staffer G. David Schine.

J. EDGAR HOOVER enjoyed free annual holidays at the Gulf Stream Hotel Apartments and Cottages on Miami Beach which was owned by Myer Schine. Hoover and Clyde Tolson, seen here, had adjacent cottages.

AMBASSADOR HOTEL

In 1986, when the Ambassador Hotel was put up for sale, the Los Angeles Times reported on the Crown connection:

Chicago businessman Lester Crown is making no promises that the hotel will be spared the wrecker’s ball. “I think that will be the determination of the purchaser,” said Crown, who is supervising the sale for the Schine family, which has owned the hotel since 1946.

Crown is overseeing the sale as part of the gradual liquidation of the theater and hotel empire of J. Myer Schine, who died in 1971. Crown, 60, is married to one of Schine’s children and himself runs a family empire that, according to a recent Business Week magazine estimate, is probably worth at least $1.5 billion.

In keeping with the Ambassador’s unorthodox history, announcement of the sale was made not by the hotel or the Schines but by Los Angeles City Councilman John Ferraro. The councilman is pushing hard, with the support of historical groups, to keep the hotel alive. His district includes the mid-Wilshire area, where the hotel is located. The hotel, set well back from Wilshire Boulevard, is surrounded by spacious gardens that are a throwback to more leisurely days.

As the Times notes, it was odd that the sale of the hotel was not announced by Lester Crown or the Schine family, but by a city councilman. Did Lester Crown want to hide the fact that he was the person selling the hotel? The Wikipedia article about the Ambassador Hotel does not even mention that the hotel had been owned since 1946 by Myer Schine. In fact, it doesn’t mention any owner at all. What a telling omission.

Knowing who owned the hotel where Bobby Kennedy was killed is important, because it was the place, the stage, where a very significant political assassination was carried out. The owner of the hotel where the crime occurred would have been in the position to manage the whole operation and control the most important factors that contributed to the murder. This is the same relationship that Larry Silverstein, the lease-holder of the World Trade Center, has to the events of 9-11. He owned and controlled the place where the crime was committed. How can the fact that the Ambassador Hotel was owned by a family closely tied to organized crime not be relevant to the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy?